In the past few years, the desire and need to reliably identify individual animals has been increasing further. Particularly if the animals' meat is intended for human consumption or if the animals are going to be part of the human consumption chain in some other way, there is a need for reliable identification. One example is the BSE problem, where the accurate determination of the origin and the life history of the animals are of importance. However, the reliable identification of animals also is desired for animals that are not destined for consumption, but e.g. is a pet, (race) horse, or the like.
The invention relates to a system which not only provides for a tag, such as an eartag, to be attached to the animal, but also achieves the simultaneous removal and storage of a sample of biological material from the animal. The removal of a small sample of the biological material and storage thereof in the sample container can have various purposes, e.g. identification of individual animals based on the “genetic fingerprint” which can be determined using the sample taken. The removed sample can also be used for other purposes, such as that one or more test are performed on the sample, e.g. molecular genetic tests, blood test(s), etc.
Such systems are known, inter alia, from WO 02/39810, WO 2006/000869, and WO2009/010658.
In presently marketed systems the stopper has a circular cutter at its front with a cutting ring made of metal. This cutter delimits a sample receiving cavity which is open at the front. The cutter removes a sample from the object with a diameter of about 4 to 5 millimeters. An issue relating to the practical use of such tagging and sampling systems is the sampling failure rate. In practice specialized laboratories receive the filled and closed sample containers from farmers and check whether a sample is actually present in the sample container. If no sample is present in the container, the laboratory informs the farmer that no sample is present and requests that a new sample is taken from the same animal. Even at failure rates between 0.5 and 1.5% this means an undesirable effort for the laboratories and farmers in view of the enormous number of animals that are to be tagged and sampled with these systems.